Album with Twelve Engravings of The Passion, a Woodcut of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and a Metalcut of St. Jerome in Penitence

Album with Twelve Engravings of The Passion, a Woodcut of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and a Metalcut of St. Jerome in Penitence

Israhel van Meckenem

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This fascinating album provides vivid testimony to the way in which prints were used in the fifteenth century. Twelve outstanding early impressions of Israhel van Meckenem’s engravings of the Passion are interleaved with manuscript text of the Hundred Meditations on the Passion of Christ. The album also includes two rare devotional prints, both hand-colored, as well as liturgical calendars and several devotional texts in Dutch. The entirety was bound into a now well-worn fifteenth-century Netherlandish leather flap binding decorated with geometrical patterns and a stamp with animals and text.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Album with Twelve Engravings of The Passion, a Woodcut of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and a Metalcut of St. Jerome in PenitenceAlbum with Twelve Engravings of The Passion, a Woodcut of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and a Metalcut of St. Jerome in PenitenceAlbum with Twelve Engravings of The Passion, a Woodcut of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and a Metalcut of St. Jerome in PenitenceAlbum with Twelve Engravings of The Passion, a Woodcut of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and a Metalcut of St. Jerome in PenitenceAlbum with Twelve Engravings of The Passion, a Woodcut of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and a Metalcut of St. Jerome in Penitence

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.